James Dolan had a lot to say about the Knicks on Craig Carton’s radio show not long ago, about Tom Thibodeau and championship banners and team chemistry and many other insights about professional basketball he seemed to consider fascinating. One of the insights was this:
“We did come to the conclusion that we had an idea how we wanted to organize the team. And that meant we needed to evolve. Actually beyond the old traditional coaching formulas.”
Dolan then added one more thing about Thibodeau, the coach he fired after he’d taken the Knicks to their first conference championship series in the 25 years since Dolan became the big boss at Madison Square Garden:
“You needed to be more of a collaborator than Tom was.”
So how has all that collaborating been working out for the Knicks lately, at least when the Brooklyn Nets don’t show up at the Garden like the Red Cross?
Maybe the Knicks can once again figure things out, before the trade deadline and beyond. Maybe they can once again start looking like the team that beat the Spurs — who’d just beaten the Thunder — to win that NBA Cup. We’re sure about to find out over the next six weeks or so, as they’re looking at a schedule that has some soft places to land on it, but also includes the 76ers (Saturday night in Philly) and Spurs and Thunder and Pistons.
Did the Knicks put it on the 12-30 Nets on Wednesday night? They did, beating them by 54 points that looked like 154 by the second half. They passed the ball and treated on-the-ball defense like something more than a hobby, and had all those guys in double figures. In the process, they got a game they badly needed no matter who it was against, especially after the way they’d just looked at the Garden against the Mavericks. That was a stink bomb that had Jimmy D. doing what a lot of other Knicks fans did that night, which means rushing for the exits before it was over as if somebody had pulled a fire alarm.
And even when that game was over, guess what? The Knicks were still closer to the Hawks in the Eastern Conference than they were to the first-place Pistons.
It was clear listening to Dolan on the radio, if you stayed with the whole thing before feeling yourself start to black out, that he was the one who’d decided that Thibodeau — the coach who finally brought the Knicks back — had taken the team as far as he could. And had clearly decided that one upset victory over the Celtics in the conference semis, even though Jayson Tatum blew out his Achilles before the end of that series, should have had the Knicks halfway to the Canyon of Heroes.
You know what happened after that. The Pacers once again sent the Knicks home, Dolan got mad, Thibodeau got gone, baby, gone. Now Mike Brown is coaching the Knicks. And after that fast Knicks start to the season, and that rousing victory over the Spurs in Vegas, the Knicks have looked like a complete mediocrity so far in 2026, with slightly less than half a season still left to play. And even though Dolan talked about how much he liked his team and didn’t expect any big changes at the deadline, well, we’re going to see about that, aren’t we?
The Knicks certainly evolved under Leon Rose and Thibodeau. But the permanent government at Madison Square Garden still has Dolan running it. The Rangers are once again a nowhere team, moving further and further away from winning Dolan his first Stanley Cup. You can only imagine what kind of panic might set in — and perhaps has set in already — if the Knicks aren’t as good as Dolan told everybody they were going to be.
Of course there’s still time. Year after year, we see the Yankees experience some kind of mid-season malaise and somehow manage to come out of it. They had one the year before last and still made it all the way to the World Series. There is still enough talent in the room for the Knicks to come out of theirs before it’s too late, even though last year’s talent has suddenly started looking a lot more mismatched lately.
And yet: Sometimes teams don’t come out of their slumps, and if you don’t believe that, ask Steve Cohen about the 2025 Mets. They fell down and never got back up, and that’s the reason why David Stearns has clearly decided to start all over again.
It is up to Collaboratin’ Brown, a very nice guy, to figure this out. It is up to him to get the Knicks to defend against someone other than the Nets. We’ve heard as much about his “system” as we heard about “culture” with the Jets when they brought in a new coach. But maybe it’s the system that has to change. It’s on the coach to get his passers — especially his perimeter passers — to not only be better moving the ball but smarter. Maybe then Jalen Brunson wouldn’t have to talk about how the current edition of the Knicks needs to care more. I don’t know about you, but they sure seemed to care last spring when Thibodeau was still the coach.
“It starts with pace,” Brunson said after the Nets game. “Obviously getting stops and running helps, but our pace offensively was great. We got in the paint, made plays, and just made a lot of good reads tonight. I think us focusing on the things that matter, like the little stuff that allows us to kind of play free on offense… It’s big time for us.”
Big time. Maybe by the beginning of March, we’ll see if that upset of the Celtics was the beginning of the biggest possible time for the Knicks. Or just a lucky punch.
